Interview: Joss Ackland - Love and Joss

He said: "This theatre is a monument to one man's courage, one man's persistence, and one man's faith."

It is appropriate to recycle these sentiments to describe the 51-year marriage of Joss and Rosemary Ackland, who were thrown together as members of that first repertory troupe: "This union was a monument to one woman's courage, one woman's persistence, and one woman's faith."

From the instant he caught sight of the actress, 11 months younger than he was, Ackland was a goner. He recalls the moment in My Better Half and Me, a selection of the diaries Rosemary kept from age 15 until her death, which he has edited and glossed with clarifications and reminiscences: "As I entered the room I saw this beautiful young girl cross the floor and perch on a window ledge. With one look I fell in love."

Inconveniently, the long-haired 22-year-old was engaged. Rosemary Kirkcaldy, as she was then, rebuffed Ackland, uttering that classic line: "I wouldn't marry you if you were the last man on earth."

Never say never. Love blossomed when they played opposite one another in JM Barrie's Mary Rose.

Thus one engagement ended and another commenced, though not without a brief overlap. On 18 August the young actors married at Pitlochry's Holy Trinity Church. After a 36-hour honeymoon at Dalmunzie House in Spittal of Glenshee, they set up in an old farmhouse on the third tee of Pitlochry's golf course while finishing the season. On their way out of town, for London, they popped into the doctor's and discovered their first child was on the way.

Joss Ackland is 81 – or 20, if you like, since his birthday is 29 February. He is what they call a bear of a man, with meaty paws and a mellifluous, deep voice. On his chest hangs a large silver locket containing a lock of Rosemary's hair, which he places beneath his pillow each night.

He has had a long journey to our meeting at Soho's Hazlitt's Hotel. It is an hour's drive to the railway station from his rambling family home in Holne, Devon, and another few hours to London. On balance, then, it is not surprising that his sentences often trail off and fail to reach a conclusion, or when he confesses to remembering nothing of the last decade.

"This is age, I'm afraid. But someone I met in 1965, I can remember immediately! I just got a copy of (1984's] Shroud for a Nightingale, which I did for TV. It's quite weird, like watching a new movie – and as Part 2 is yet to come, I'm dying to know whether I did it or not! And I am not all that impressed by my performance, frankly."

You would forgive him deleting much of the last decade when you learn that it was 2000 when Rosemary was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, the incurable paralysing illness that claimed the lives of David Niven and American baseball player Lou Gehrig.

Over the next two years, with Joss by her side performing the most intimate of caring tasks, Rosemary fought the worst ravages of the disease, before succumbing in 2002. For Ackland, it was worse than an amputation – he and Rosemary were virtually one person, he says.

Yet their backgrounds could not have been more different. Ackland, a Londoner, was, to all intents and purposes, raised by a single mum who fought to make ends meet. His liquor-loving, libido-driven father, a journalist with a penchant for impregnating hapless housemaids, was rarely around. As a result, Ackland grew close to his mum and older sister, especially after his brother was killed during the Second World War.

Rosemary's grandmother, the first white woman to settle in Nyasaland (now Malawi), opened Hotel Ryalls, and her father was an equally successful businessman. She grew up attended by a retinue of servants, amid beautiful and exotic surroundings – and was so beautiful herself that she was endlessly pursued. Early diary entries show her to be something of a flirt, it must be said.

If Ackland's childhood was hard scrabble but largely happy, Rosemary's was lonely. She and her father were close, but neither could confide in her mother. "She had a lonely childhood. She was off with the horse all the time and there were rows at home." Rosemary was sent to boarding school and ultimately escaped to South Africa to study medicine, but transferred to the dance and drama course without informing her parents. Nor did she tell them of her move to London – until, that is, she wrote home and said, by the way, note the new postmark.

Did Ackland perceive this remarkable steely strength from the outset? "I didn't sense it straightaway," he replies. "She effortlessly went through things. It was later that I realised how bloody lucky I was."

Initially they were both jobbing actors. Rosemary was scheduled to tour America when the Pitlochry run ended. But two children came in rapid succession and the newlyweds' financial state veered from edgy to dire. Often Ackland was performing in regional theatre, leaving Rosemary wandering the streets – perhaps in another city – looking for housing, "pushing their pram from place to place until her hands froze to the handle".

He writes: "Only a few years before, the carefree, ambitious young girl had the world at her feet with a great future before her. Since we married she had faced poverty, disappointment, and a bleak future with resilience and without complaint. Now all she could do was help her children survive. We had reached the point of no return."

They decided to try Africa, leaving almost immediately, spurred on by the unexpected death of Rosemary's father. Instantaneous decisions like this were characteristic, says Ackland.

"We never thought, 'We'll have a big family.' We never thought we'd have a small family. We never thought. I think that's how we survived with all the desperate things that did go wrong, which I don't think many people can cope with nowadays. It wasn't because we were brave. It was because we were dumb, and we just accepted.

"Wait, no, I don't think dumb. It's an entirely different approach to life: that things happen because they happen. Like the decision to go off to Africa. It was done in a second. One never argued with yourself or other people about it."

Ackland toiled on a tea plantation in Lilongewe, but a few months into their adventure, finding conditions too perilous for their children's safety (and admittedly keen to resume acting), they decided to return to England, via a visit to Cape Town. In the event, they settled there for two and a half years, with a roof over their heads and acting jobs aplenty for the pair of them.

Although secure and solvent for the first time, the young family returned to London, this time hastened by the news that Joss's mother was dying of brain cancer. Their marriage continued to be punctuated by absences, with Joss travelling to wherever there was work, mainly in the theatre, as the boom in his film career was some years in the future. At one point he was appearing in a play in Scotland, and it was there that their fifth child was conceived under romantic yet odd circumstances.

By now there were four children. Rosemary fell pregnant again, but miscarried. Doctors told her that she would soon not be able to have any more children: her fallopian tubes were closing. She could, however, fit in one last pregnancy if she moved swiftly. So she leapt on the first train to Glasgow, found her husband, and together they raced to Pitlochry, where daughter Samantha was conceived by a stream in the woods.

It is difficult, I say, to fathom why they went to so much effort with four kids at home already. "We never planned our children," Ackland counters. Why, I persist, did Rosemary think it imperative to race to Scotland to have one more baby (who, in the event, wouldn't be their last)?

"Rosemary was worried because she was told she couldn't have any more. It wasn't because we planned to have more. But she didn't like restriction. So when she was told that, she ran up to Scotland and we went off to Pitlochry, under a tree. The funny thing was I had a red beard for the part (I was playing] and Samantha was born as the only red haired child in the family."

I must look the picture of puzzlement, because he adds: "Our children were our life. It just sort of happened. They still are. It's also that having a large family now is slightly different to having a large family then. We were encouraged to, after the war."

For the record, the current total stands at seven children, of whom six survive, 32 grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

Amazingly enough, non-stop pregnancies and eternal money worries were the least of Rosemary's problems. In 1963, when Samantha was a year old and Rosemary was again five months pregnant, their house in Barnes burned down. With her clothes burning, she raced around the house, throwing her children to safety through the windows into the neighbours' waiting arms, before finally leaping out herself. But she was not caught. Badly burned, she also suffered a broken back, which paralysed her from the waist down.

Doctors presumed she would die, or at the very least, lose the baby. They insisted that she'd never walk again. Doctors had not reckoned on Rosemary's fortitude. Despite extensive burns and her broken back, she refused painkillers in order to save the baby's life, decanting them into nearby plant pots. Over the next two years she moved from walking with calipers to walking unaided. And she gave birth to a healthy baby girl, followed, a few years later, by a second son.

Ackland writes: "The paralysis was permanent, and never again would she be able to run. Standing still was also difficult, but except for having a slight limp, Rosemary always managed to give the impression that everything was normal."

Now he says: "She had this extraordinary thing of accepting things. This is why fame never meant anything to her, nor did disaster. She would sort of bounce through it in the most unique, extraordinary way."

Rosemary was integral to Ackland's success, working through each role with him, so I wonder whether she favoured one performance over another? No, he says, before talking about the original television production of Shadowlands, which won him tremendous acclaim. "Rosemary said: 'That's very good. Yes, that's very good.' So she always kept me in order. She was the same with the kids. She created a quiet discipline. She would organise. She just got on with life."

But tragedy haunted them. Their eldest son, Paul, died of a heroin overdose. Then, in 1988, while crossing the road in Paris, they were struck by a car. Rosemary's injuries were bad and badly treated. A metal plate was inserted in her leg and was the cause of near permanent pain. Some years later the plate became infected and broke through the skin, resulting in still more hospitalisations and treatments.

Few people have to learn to walk three times, Ackland points out. "Now, she was cross about that. But she didn't moan about it. The accident was so completely unnecessary, and they were kids who were driving. But they've got this crazy law over there, that if someone is knocked down, then the person who knocks them down is 'mildly guilty', that's it. So I'm afraid Paris is not my meeting ground. I can never go back."

He contemplates this litany of heartache and says: "It would have been disaster if we hadn't been so desperately in love with each other."

One of Rosemary's coping mechanisms, it transpires, was to turn a blind eye. These are edited diary extracts, to be sure, but many of the events Ackland notes in his glossary do not appear in Rosemary's entries.

"Anything that is unpleasant she doesn't touch. She didn't discuss it with herself. It stabilised our life, her doing that. I could have been much more dramatic and flamboyant about things, but she would always settle me down. It was through her strength that we coped, this quiet, extraordinary, innocent thing – it was very powerful."

From time to time Rosemary's speech was slurred, and Ackland would accuse her of over-imbibing. "The only real rows we had were over her speech, and I've discovered that it was exactly the same thing with David Niven, that people thought he was drunk. It didn't upset me whether or not Rosemary drank, but I'd say: 'Oh come on, you're pissed.' I think that accusation upset her more because she knew something was wrong. She did conceal that, I'm sure, because she'd had motor neurone (disease] for some time before it came out."

When the disease rendered Rosemary unable to write, Ackland helped out. "And that's when I saw the diary. (Before that] it never occurred to me to read it, or to her to show it to me. We were so close that it was not necessary. I find it amazing now: How did I go all those years without asking? I didn't even want to. Why?

"There were no shocks, but I did find a lot of it so funny. The innocence! She remained innocent to the end, and she looked so young. Once, in Barnes, she was going through the street with a pram and five children, and this old woman came up and said: 'Your mother ought to be ashamed of herself allowing you out with all these children on your own!'"

Much as he adores his family, Ackland, who has spent the past six years slaving over this tribute to his late wife, now seems to exist in a holding pattern, counting down the moments until he and Rosemary are reunited on the other side. He is absolutely certain she will be there, waiting, and that they will pick up where they left off, joyously joined at the hip.

My Better Half and Me: A Love Affair that Lasted Fifty Years by Joss and Rosemary Ackland, is published by Ebury Press, priced 18.99.

Joss Ackland appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday, 24 August, at 3pm.